The word of the day is “balance”

The “drink” word for Obama’s speech today- “Fairness”, or “Balance”? Taranto thinks “balance” based on yesterday’s presser by Jay Carney. [Side note – how long do you think he’ll hold that job?]

He will very clearly lay out his vision for deficit reduction, the need for it to be balanced, the need for it to be bipartisan,” he said. Promising a “reasonable and calm approach,” he added again, “We strongly disagree with the lack of balance in Congressman Ryan’s approach. . . . The president believes that we have to have balance. . . . and the plan that Congressman Ryan laid out does not do that, fails the test of reaching that balance.”

I’m guessing that people have caught on to the dealo that fairness is code for socialism. Our new code word, and thus “drink” term, will be “balance.”

I am sad to say, what I have witnessed during my lifetime, is a slow but steady drift, and I would argue over the last two years, a lurch, toward a culture of entitlement and dependency. This is not an America I recognize. It is not an America that will work.

Even worse, we have granted entitlements and encouraged dependency with little thought as to how we would pay for it. We have racked up enormous debt, and now the bill is coming due.

Oh, I know. TAX THE RICH. But, that bastard Paul Ryan wants to give tax cuts to the rich, and the poor and helpless to DIE in the STREETS.

The Ryan budget outline by design does not provide many tax specifics, aside from an instruction to the Ways and Means Committee to propose a reform plan that would swap lower rates for fewer loopholes and special exclusions. This overhaul is not even a net tax cut—the instructions are to design a reform that is revenue neutral. It would hold tax receipts to their post-World War II average of between 18% to 19% as a share of the economy.

The liberal claim that this means a tax cut for the wealthy is based entirely on the fact that marginal tax rates would decline, even though the loopholes primarily benefit higher-income taxpayers. At any rate, Mr. Obama’s own deficit commission also favored lowering the rates and broadening the base for a more efficient and competitive tax code.

But amid all the talk of fairness balance today, Obama’s prolly gonna explain that we need to keep spendinginvesting:

Whenever the president acknowledges the budget deficit and the $14+ trillion national debt, he says yes, yes, of course, we have to cut waste. He then proceeds to provide a long list of things we need to “invest” more in like education, bridges, green energy and protecting “the most vulnerable” in our society.

Obama doesn’t realize how many millions of Americans consider themselves vulnerable today, even with jobs and a home for now. In Philadelphia when one man dared to ask about the rising price of gas for his commuObama visits the Lincoln Memorial 4-9-11te, the president suggested he trade-in for a new car. This from the green president who took a 17-vehicle motorcade of limos and SUVs to admire clean cars last month. Not even one symbolic electric job.

But, the conversation has turned, thanks to Paul Ryan, to cuts. Obama needs to recapture the conversation says Malcolm:

Hence, again the perceived need for another Obama speech today. He’ll try to recapture control by adjusting the subject: Yes, yes the deficit is bad, though not as bad as you-know-which party makes it out to be. We do need to trim it with some cuts over time. But what we really need is more money to get stuff done.

You know, those rich people with the money to create new jobs? Let’s take some more from them in taxes and Social Security assessments. Not from you! From them. Who’s gonna oppose somebody else paying more taxes?

We’ll hear, as Mark Levin noted this evening, about “tax expenditures” (or something similar), a phrase that will, through a trick of language, look to shift the structural economic platform of our country: underlying this idea is that all money and wealth belongs to the government, you as a subject are allowed to keep certain amounts as decided upon by government. This allowance — you keeping money that would otherwise go to the government — is a tax expenditure, from the perspective of the Marxists, an outlay of their money (they as representative of “the people”) to you. An allowance, if you will.

But of course, with increased taxes and regulations on business and industry, the price of fuel, electricity, and staples such as food and clothing will rise, creating a kind of consumption tax on everyone.

Depressed yet? Because there’s more:

By corrupting the language, the left owns the message and is able to frame it for us using tropes we as a classically liberal country are familiar with: fairness, opportunity, justice, sacrifice, freedom. Only today, “fairness” is defined as an equal dose of misery to all (except those who get to do the ruling); “opportunity” is granted by the government; “justice” has to do with equality of outcome; “sacrifice” means turning over more of your labor — and the wealth it generates — to a centralized power that creates no wealth yet presumes to control it all and divide it up as it sees fit; and “freedom” is refigured as the security provided by the nannystate, a freedom from having to take risk, a freedom from the ideals of individualism and self-reliance and a reliance on a sprawling centralized government and its administrative arms.